The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
by HedgieX
Summary: It had filled her with both dread and purpose, to think that she was going to be 'Mother', rather than 'Nobody'. A one-shot following on from Chapter 28 of Bleeding Love, after Nicki's suicide attempt; her feelings about losing her child and yet surviving herself.


A one-shot following on from Nicki's attempted suicide in _Bleeding Love._

Slight confession to make. Because of how poor I was at updating, I forgot what I'd written previously sometimes; in Chapter 28, I made reference to the fact that Nicki had been pregnant when she'd jumped, and that the baby had died, yet this was never mentioned again.

So anyway, this is some drabble to tie up that particular loose end, I hope all of the lovely ex-_Bleeding Love_ readers enjoy this. I thought it was appropriate that the title _The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face_ also comes from a Leona Lewis song, although I've never heard it.

Dedicated to the girl who is never satisfied.

**The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face  
Waterloo Road | Bleeding Love**

She didn't know if any of the doctors had mentioned her pregnancy (or lack of it) to Tom, after that evening. She thought she'd seen his gaze linger on her stomach for a moment longer than was entirely natural a couple of times, but perhaps she was paranoid. Well, she was definitely paranoid, there was no 'perhaps' about it. If Tom had known, he'd been incredibly discreet, and that was yet another thing she was indebted to him for.

She would trust Tom with her life. Was that an ironic thing to say, given that he'd tried to stop her from committing suicide, and she'd gone ahead and jumped anyway? Life was full of darker ironies than she'd imagined were possible. She'd trust him with her life, and yet she could not discuss her dead child with him. Sometimes, the more you loved someone, the harder it became to tell them the things that broke you into pieces.

She'd discovered, since she'd begun to have therapy during her recovery (she'd been cynical, but it did help, to be able to pour out your worries to someone impartial) that writing lists was the easiest way to go about thinking about things.

And so this was what had happened:

a) She'd got drunk, really drunk. She wasn't sure when it had happened, exactly, but she could work it out to within about a week because of the pregnancy. She'd been drunk, and someone had been kind to her and one thing had led to another – oh God, the clichés – and evidently he hadn't been so kind, because he hadn't thought about contraception

b) She'd begun to feel strange, floaty almost, and bloated. She'd ignored it, but there were the giveaway signs of non-existent periods, and then came the sickness. She'd collapsed at school once, exhausted from trying to do a million things at once; she was sure Sian had guessed, but she too had been discreet.

c) She'd been unable to ignore it any longer, and the weeing on a stick (you would have thought, with all the advances in technology, that someone would have invented a nicer way to test for pregnancy by now) confirmed what she knew.

She'd known she couldn't get rid of it. Again, that was ironic, given what had happened to the child, although she didn't think of it as a child. She couldn't think of it as a child, she didn't have the strength to cope with being a murderer. She'd bought baby clothes in both pink and blue, and later when she'd discovered it was a girl she'd bought pink blankets and pink teddy bears. She'd done all of this alone, coped with the sympathetic 'oh, you're a singer mother' smiles she got from shop assistants, covered herself up with baggy tops.

It had filled her with both dread and purpose, to think that she was going to be 'Mother', rather than 'Nobody'.

She wished she hadn't burnt the scan photos now. They'd been all she'd had left of the baby, maybe that was why she'd needed to get rid of them. As soon as she'd been well enough to go home, she'd taken all of the post from the doormat where it had been lying for weeks, and burnt it in the back garden, then thrown on the scan photos.

She regretted it. After they'd become dried black crisps, she'd suddenly been desperate to get them back, and she'd stuck her hand into the flames and tried to piece together the shards of nothingness into something. Luckily, Tom had found her in the back garden before she could do anything even more stupid, like throw herself on the makeshift bonfire. She wouldn't have put it past herself; she hadn't known what she was capable of in those weeks.

She hoped it was all in the past now, that she was on the way to recovering, but she kept thinking of the baby, and she also kept thinking of the envelopes she'd burnt, and how bad for the environment that had been, because they'd had those little plastic windows so you could see the name on the letter inside, and plastic was toxic when burnt. It was stupid to care about such a little thing when you'd murdered your child, she knew.

She hadn't told anyone about her pregnancy; she hadn't really had anyone to tell. She would have told Tom, of course, if things had worked out differently. When she'd first found out she was pregnant she'd bought a baby name book too, and spent evening after evening with Coronation Street rolling in the background as she leafed through and picked out names she liked.

There was Florence, which meant 'flowering; in bloom', and Elena, which meant 'light; mercy; the bright one'. She liked the names of the past, didn't want them to die out.

Nicki, she discovered, meant 'victory of the people'. There was another dark irony for you. A darker one was that she'd tried to commit suicide, and yet she was frightened of death. Most people were, Tom said, but that didn't comfort her. Poor Tom, nothing he said comforted her, she could see how hard he tried, making her hot baths and buying her flowers, but he couldn't ever understand. She didn't think she wanted him to understand, she didn't want to inflict that on him.

She wouldn't ever have a child, she knew. It was something she refused to even consider. That was like saying 'oh, I didn't care enough for the last one to keep it alive, but I can have another one now', it was like she was putting no value whatsoever on the baby's life. When she'd jumped, the baby had mattered more than herself.

She'd wanted to die, but she'd wanted the baby to survive. Stupid thing was that it had worked out the other way round. Perhaps she should have waited until the baby was born. Although she'd promised Tom she wouldn't think about suicide ever again, and she meant to keep that promise; he'd made her life worth living now, she didn't want to hurt him.

She didn't want to hurt Josh either. Josh was like a son to her, which was maybe perverse, but she loved him, he kept her going as much as Tom did.

She hadn't been paying attention to the radio, but the beginning of the song they were playing hit her hard in the gut. _The first time ever I saw your face_, a lone voice sang. Ironic, that she'd never seen her baby girl's face. It was what she deserved.


End file.
